When we lived in South Florida, Eckerd Drugs was our go-to drugstore. They were convenient, friendly, well-stocked, and not too expensive, at least not for sundries, which is mostly what we bought there. One of the things we bought there, and brought with us to California nearly 36 years ago, was a pumice stone.

I’ve always been amused by the old-fashioned look of the box and the claim: “when soap fails…pumice prevails”.

Sadly, both Eckart Drugs and Requa Mfg. Co. have vanished, but the pumice stone still works as well as ever.t all

I spent most of this afternoon working on the alarm interface to the Raspberry Pi; I found problems with my wiring and fixed them, but that didn’t solve my problem. In fact, things got worse – the Raspberry Pi is no longer able to talk to the AD2PI at all. So I decided to take the Raspberry Pi out of its case so I could make absolutely sure that I was properly mounting the AD2PI to the Pi.

One end of the Pi released from the mounting pins very easily; the other end didn’t want to move. I kept tugging and nothing happened; I tried flexing the case, but nothing happened. I tried to put the Pi back onto the mounting pins – no dice. I swore – it made me feel better, but did nothing to solve the problem. Even a screwdriver wasn’t helpful.

Finally, I found a posting that suggested using spudgers to get just enough leverage to release the board, and that worked!

When all else fails, spudgers prevail!

We keep both of our cars in the garage – they fit, but there’s not a lot of room to move around in there. The last time I drove my car, I happened to park it a bit farther from the wall than usual – nearly three feet between the car and the shelves I’ve been planning to organize forever.

This morning, we had to leave Diane’s car outside when we got home from our trainer because our landscaper was working on the sprinkler system. After he left, I took advantage of having easy access to the sides of the garage and got to work.

I got rid of a lot of old plant labels and the temporary pots the plants came in, boxed up my collection of water-saving shower heads and aerators, as well as corralling all of our miscellaneous irrigation parts. I did some other consolidation, too.

I only spent about an hour on it before the garage got too hot to work in, but I feel like I made great progress, and I haven’t even started to use the containers I bought at the Container Store last year!

In other news, a spammer tried to comment on the blog today, with a comment that said nothing but looked plausible; the goal was to get me to link to their website. I used to get a lot of such spam attempts; this is the first one that’s gotten as far as my inbox in quite a while. I guess writing steadily builds an audience!